Racial Preferences

Years ago, after it came to light that athletes at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill took bogus courses in African and Afro-American studies, I wrote; In my opinion, based on the facts I’ve seen so far, this story isn’t about football; it’s about academic corruption. Now, after years of investigating, the NCAA has reached basically the same conclusion. As a result, the University will not by sanctioned by »

Are Asians an oppressed minority in America, or not? We know for a fact that elite universities are nowadays discriminating against Asian applicants in much the same way they discriminated against Jewish applicants decades ago. But didn’t a lot of Asians historically suffer the same kind of discrimination that Irish, Italian, and other immigrants nowadays considered part of the world of “white supremacy”? For example, there’s a little noticed passage »

Mark Graber is a distinguished law professor at the University of Maryland. Until very recently, he coached the school’s mock trial team, leading it to the national championship in (or around) 2008. Until very recently, his daughter Abigail Graber assisted him. She’s an attorney in Washington, D.C. who clerked for a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and served on the Yale Law Journal. On »

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson announced yesterday that “every time we have an opening for an ambassador position, at least one of the candidates must be a minority candidate.” This is a version of the Rooney Rule used by the NFL to fill coaching vacancies. It’s named after former Pittsburgh Steelers owner Dan Rooney. Ironically, Rooney was U.S. ambassador to Ireland during the Obama administration. He gained that post the »

Michael Smerconish interviews Vijay Jojo Chokalingam, a dark-skinned man of (Asian) Indian descent who got admitted to medical school by pretending to be black. Despite carrying what he calls a pitiful 3.1 grade point average (and that is quite low given today’s grade inflation), he made the waiting list at two of the five most highly rated med schools in the country and was admitted to a school where the »

We noted here a few weeks ago the ruckus over the Rhodes College feminist philosopher Rebecca Tuvel, who foolishly thought that the same logic that applied to gender identity (namely that you pick your own) should apply equally to racial identity. Why not? We’re sometimes told from the identity politics left that race is a social construct, too, except when we’re told it isn’t. Left unexplored was exactly why Tuvel’s »

Kim Rivera, the chief legal officer and general counsel of HP Inc., has sent a letter to law firms that represent that company. The letter “mandates” (HP’s word) that these firms meet racial, ethnic, and gender quotas she has set for them. Rivera states that HP will withhold up to 10 percent of any amount invoiced by the law firms if they “do not meet or exceed our minimal diverse »

Donald Trump’s selection of Betsy DeVos for Secretary of Education has met with considerable praise from conservatives, and for good reason. She has been excellent on school choice issues. However, the Secretary of Education is not in much of a position to affect school choice policy. Perhaps DeVos will help persuade some Republicans at the state and local level to be less resistant to school choice. Other than that, I’m »

The Obama administration is proposing to create a new category for people who identify as “Middle Eastern or North African.” These people are currently classified as “white.” This means they aren’t entitled to the preferences our government grants to non-whites in a host of areas including employment and assistance to businesses. Commissioner Peter Kirsanow of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights opposes this latest effort to subdivide Americans. He sets »

Last Friday, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported on a decision by General Mills, one of the nation’s largest advertisers, to impose race and gender quotas on the advertising agencies it uses: The Golden Valley-based foodmaker wants the creative departments in agencies bidding for its business to be staffed at least half by women and 20 percent by people of color. *** In revealing its standard, General Mills executives said they »

Ammo Grrrll has a few thoughts about THE LEAST INTERESTING THING. She writes: I am so sick of the fifty-year “conversation” (read: tedious harangue) on Race. But since Eric Holder called me a coward for failing to converse on race, let me weigh in. There will be three columns in a row on the subject. Is there anything LESS interesting about a person than his skin color? But this is »

In an opinion issued this morning, Justice Kennedy joined the Supreme Court’s four liberals to uphold the University of Texas’s “affirmative action” program in the Fisher case. This is the case’s second trip to the Court. It won’t be coming back. The Court’s opinion today is posted here. The Court’s 2013 opinion in Fisher I (as the Court refers to it) is posted here. I think today’s result is disappointing, »

TaxProf Paul Caron excerpts the Wall Street Journal Law Blog’s post on Professor Richard Sander’s attempts to get the California state bar to cough up bar passage data by race. For some reason the powers that be have escaped scrutiny over the racial disparities that dog bar passage rates. Professor Sander’s long legal fight for the data is headed for trial. The authorities guard the relevant data more carefully than »

Last week, Scott and I wrote about an article by Katherine Kersten regarding the ruinous impact on schools in the Twin Cities of racial “equity” in school discipline. As Kersten demonstrated, the attempt to reduce the number of disciplinary actions against minority school children, on the theory that they are disproportionately disciplined, has helped turn some schools in the Twin Cities into war zones. Peter Kirsanow, a member of the »

My friend Kathy Kersten wrote the devastating column featured in the Star Tribune this past Sunday on disorder in the St. Paul public schools following from the directives of the Obama administration. Kathy’s column was published as “The school safety debate: Mollycoddle no more.” I drew attention to Kathy’s column in “Kersten’s discipline.” Paul reviewed the column at length in “The war on standards in Twin Cities schools.” Yesterday the »

The Washington Post reports that the Montgomery County school district (which covers an affluent suburban county just outside of Washington, D.C.) is concerned about racial disparities in its “gifted student” programs. A report it commissioned found marked disparities by race and ethnicity in enrollment and acceptance rates, with white and Asian students faring much better than their black and Hispanic counterparts. The report notes, for example, that enrollment in the »

I hope you read Katherine Kersten’s article, presented yesterday by Scott, about the impact of “equity” in disciplinary action on schools in the Twin Cities. As Kersten explains, “equity” in this context isn’t about fairness — that is, the same rules for everyone. Rather, it means that “if one group’s outcomes on social measures are not identical to all of the others’, the cause is presumed to be discrimination and »